7 ms·

Home of Strategic Command and Some of the USAF's Most Prized Aircraft Flooded

88 points by howard941 8y ago

SiempreViernes 8y ago
This is the national emergency that you hear about on the news, right?
- benj111 8y ago
  As I understand it, it needs to be something unforeseen and/or fast moving. Climate change has been predicted for some time. So probably not, as the president has well paid advisors that will have advised him of this fact. And the president won't want to overreach his authority.
- war1025 8y ago
  It's not getting a lot of coverage on the news, but it will absolutely get state and federal emergency funding.
deadmetheny 8y ago
I've noticed an almost complete lack of coverage of the flooding in Iowa and Nebraska - I have a lot of family there and the amount of damage has been astounding[1]. Nebraska has more miles of rivers than any state in the US, and many of them are flooding or close to it. It's a complete disaster there. [1]https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and-after-images-midwest-nebraska https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and...
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  For the most part people on the coasts are who the news are catering to (that's where the millions of eyeballs that you can show ads to are) and they don't really care about the Midwest, at least not specifically. Also some dude literally on the other side of the world shot some other people in a highly provocative manner so that's in the news instead because it's easier to milk that for eyeball minutes. I'm sure this will earn me a bunch of "no, I totally care" down-votes but as you click the feel good button you should ask yourself, would you actually be interested in what's going on in Nebraska on a normal, not submerged in several feet of water, day?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- darkpuma 8y ago
  People on the coast get flooded by violent weather systems such as hurricanes, while people inland tend to get flooded because they chose to live in a floodplain and there was a bit more snow melt this year than usual. Justly or not, the former tends to be seen as a "random natural disaster", and therefore newsworthy, while the later tends to be seen as "idiots reaping what they sowed", and therefore less newsworthy. Edit: To be clear, I personally find the bias to be unwarranted since storm surge zones are generally equivalent to floodplains; anybody living there should know about it and has made their choice. However, it should be noted that a hurricane becomes more newsworthy the further up the coast it strikes, particularly if it's north of Virginia. This increase in newsworthiness reflects the decreasing attitude of "they should have anticipated that. People in Florida being hit by a hurricane is more expected than people living in New Jersey or New York. That's why a hurricanes, which are generally newsworthy, become even more newsworthy the further from Florida it hits the coast.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    People on the coasts live in floodplains too. Living in floodplains is just a fact of life. Has been for 10's of millennia. Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians, Chinese, and so on and so forth back to the beginning. They all built in floodplains. Let's stop jabbing a finger at people and give them a hand instead. If you don't want to lend a hand, that's fine too, just go about your day. No need to denigrate people.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      > "People on the coasts live in floodplains too" Yes I understand that, but that's not how it's perceived. People do not have objective worldviews, and it is the worldviews of the general public that determine whether or not something is considered newsworthy. I'm not defending this status quo, I'm explaining it. Something else to consider: hurricanes are personified. They're given names, and therefore make convenient villains. This increases their newsworthiness. If particularly snowy winters or intense rainstorms were given names, that would increase the newsworthiness of inland floods. Another thing to consider: when an inland flood occurs due to a dam collapse, rather than because of unnamed weather systems, that becomes more newsworthy and memorable than most hurricanes. I'd say the Johnstown Flood is about as memorable, maybe moreso, than the Galveston Hurricane, despite killing fewer people. That's because the Johnstown Flood was due to a dam collapse. A dam with a name, a discrete object with human owners. That's why an inland flood in rural Pennsylvania is remembered nearly a century and a half later, while most inland floods hardly make the news at all. Consider also the Great Molasses Flood. By flood standards or even industrial disaster standards, the number of casualties were small. However everybody has heard of the Great Molasses Flood. Why? Because it happened in Boston? No, because it was molasses! That's very unusual, nobody would have anticipated that, and therefore it's newsworthy.
- holtalanm 8y ago
  from nebraska. can confirm. entire towns have been evacuated due to flooding. only way to get around some of them currently is via airboat.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Its not on the coast or in Chicago or Denver, so it really will only get regional coverage. The book about fark.com "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News" has a section illustrating this with a crane collapse in Manhattan and then one in St. Louis. A few years back with that winter storm hit South Dakota and killed a lot of cattle (the cattle were mostly in the summer fields and the weather actually went from freezing rain to blizzard), it wasn't really reported and people wondered what the heck was going on with steak prices. I sometimes wish there was a "trend news" website that reported supply to consumer news.
- kevinconaway 8y ago
  There was a front page story about it in the New York Times last week (in fact there is still a story on the home page below the fold about it [0]) but it got bumped for coverage of the attack in NZ [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/flood-facts.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/flood-facts.html?actio...
- wffurr 8y ago
  I didn't have to dig far in the Boston Globe to find an article about it. It's third in the Nation and World section.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dd36 8y ago
Wow. Why have this much critical infrastructure near flood zones? Given that climate change is increasing the frequency of major floods, why hadn’t they hardened their protections?
- philwelch 8y ago
  Airfields tend to be easier to build on flat, level ground. Strategic reconnaissance and airborne command aircraft make sense to base in a geographically central location so they can easily cover the entire continent.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- namenumber 8y ago
  From the omaha.com article on the subject it seems like there was a desire from Offett and an intent to put in greater flood-resistance infrastructure but it was stonewalled by questions about whether it was needed. So i guess the answer is in the realm of "some people knew and planned, but others tried to disregard both warnings and previous near-disaster floods." https://www.omaha.com/news/military/one-third-of-offutt-underwater-at-least-buildings-damaged-in/article_631f9b34-5271-50e8-b5eb-19f488daaf32.html https://www.omaha.com/news/military/one-third-of-offutt-unde...
  - dd36 8y ago
    Sounds like what’s happening at a larger scale =(
- oliveshell 8y ago
  I’d imagine that the location was seen as useful during the Cold War years due to being far inland in a rural area away from likely targets of a nuclear attack. As for flood mitigation, I’m sure it’s the same as it is anywhere: risk assessments probably considered the likelihood of ‘really bad’ flooding, and the potential impacts, too low to be worth the cost. (As to whether that was wise or not, I’ve got no idea.) (Edit— from Wikipedia: ”Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington chose to locate the Air Force's crucial long-range atomic strike force at Offutt primarily because the base was centrally located on the North American continent, placing it well beyond the existing range of long-range, nuclear-armed bombers to (then) stay safely out of range of hostile missiles or bomber aircraft.”)
dev_dull 8y ago
I just heard about the flooding yesterday. Sometimes I don’t get the news. I’ll see wall-to-wall coverage on some inane thing, but only learn about huge, destructive flooding from random people I follow on Twitter. Maybe we’re just sleeping in the bed we made, but how do we get out of it?
- jnurmine 8y ago
  Well, some people think that we can't, the only thing left to do is to brace for impact. The one getting most media visibility recently is Jem Bendell's "deep adaptation". This is not a new invention though. It was preceded by various resilient communities/resilient cities approaches, post-societal crash prepper books and prepper forums in general, and so on.
cowkingdeluxe 8y ago
Related to this base, if you want to see the F22 fly up close, go the day before an airshow there to the east end of the runway and you will only be hundreds of feet away. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+NE/@41.1108278,-95.891636,754m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x879477c2e10f0c3d:0xd7d7cf14fa470392!8m2!3d41.1242718!4d-95.9145568 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+NE/@41.1108278...
aquova 8y ago
Just to give my experience: I'm from Nebraska, and was back there this past week. When I arrived home (in Lincoln), there was still 4-6 inches of snow on the ground, following the snowiest winter they've had in decades. It turned about 60 degrees on a rainy day and all that snow melted, but the ground was still frozen and had nowhere to go. We didn't have bad flooding in my area, but my parents yard was ankle deep in water for about 24 hours. The interstates were closed, and I got detoured twice driving out. It really is something.
zackmorris 8y ago
The Cooper nuclear power plant 59 miles from Omaha is also shutting down temporarily due to flooding: https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station-still-operating-but-preparing-for-shutdown-as/article_f0edca08-0454-5795-8622-3646e954ae5e.html https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station-still... The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant 18 miles from Omaha was shut down permanently on October 24, 2016 due to flooding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Calhoun_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Calhoun_Nuclear_Generatin...
- deadmetheny 8y ago
  The river isn't necessarily going to reach the 45' point that CNS requires for shutdown - it might, but no guarantee. FCNS shut down due to budgetary concerns - its operational costs were too high to justify keeping it open. The flood was just the last of a long series of issues they had down there.
newnewpdro 8y ago
George Carlin used to criticize people living in flood planes back in the day, catastrophic flooding is such a regular occurrence it made its way into his stand-up routine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw
ycombinatoracct 8y ago
Offutt AFB isn't too far from GCP us-central1. Anyone know if Google Cloud has said anything about the flood?
- kevin_b_er 8y ago
  https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic-floods-inundate-nebraska https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic-flo... See the interactive slidable map. A google data center that is probably us-central1 is just above the lake above the 'e' in Detail. The waters appear to still be a ways off. Google says it is in Council Bluffs, Iowa and there's a large google data center there you can find on google maps. A link to the location on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22 https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22
protomyth 8y ago
I'm actually a bit worried about the Red River in North Dakota. 1997 really was not very fun (well, the 96-97 winter was horrid). This rapid melt with too much snow and frozen ground is hitting a lot of places. My parent's place in MN had water coming in the basement apartment. It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.
- mitchty 8y ago
  > It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are. I'm from ND originally and remember that flood, and yeah, it floods here in the cities a lot. This was more due to the super: zomg cold+snow, to... zomg its 40F and the entire streets a river cause nobody cleans out the drains in the fall prior to winter so that thaws are ok. I'll just say in St Paul, rapid thaws means almost everyones basements flood. Even on the hills, its insane how easily it happens.

88 points by howard941 8y ago

SiempreViernes 8y ago

This is the national emergency that you hear about on the news, right?

benj111 8y ago
As I understand it, it needs to be something unforeseen and/or fast moving. Climate change has been predicted for some time. So probably not, as the president has well paid advisors that will have advised him of this fact. And the president won't want to overreach his authority.
war1025 8y ago
It's not getting a lot of coverage on the news, but it will absolutely get state and federal emergency funding.

deadmetheny 8y ago

I've noticed an almost complete lack of coverage of the flooding in Iowa and Nebraska - I have a lot of family there and the amount of damage has been astounding[1]. Nebraska has more miles of rivers than any state in the US, and many of them are flooding or close to it. It's a complete disaster there. [1]https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and-after-images-midwest-nebraska https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and...

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
For the most part people on the coasts are who the news are catering to (that's where the millions of eyeballs that you can show ads to are) and they don't really care about the Midwest, at least not specifically. Also some dude literally on the other side of the world shot some other people in a highly provocative manner so that's in the news instead because it's easier to milk that for eyeball minutes. I'm sure this will earn me a bunch of "no, I totally care" down-votes but as you click the feel good button you should ask yourself, would you actually be interested in what's going on in Nebraska on a normal, not submerged in several feet of water, day?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
darkpuma 8y ago
People on the coast get flooded by violent weather systems such as hurricanes, while people inland tend to get flooded because they chose to live in a floodplain and there was a bit more snow melt this year than usual. Justly or not, the former tends to be seen as a "random natural disaster", and therefore newsworthy, while the later tends to be seen as "idiots reaping what they sowed", and therefore less newsworthy. Edit: To be clear, I personally find the bias to be unwarranted since storm surge zones are generally equivalent to floodplains; anybody living there should know about it and has made their choice. However, it should be noted that a hurricane becomes more newsworthy the further up the coast it strikes, particularly if it's north of Virginia. This increase in newsworthiness reflects the decreasing attitude of "they should have anticipated that. People in Florida being hit by a hurricane is more expected than people living in New Jersey or New York. That's why a hurricanes, which are generally newsworthy, become even more newsworthy the further from Florida it hits the coast.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  People on the coasts live in floodplains too. Living in floodplains is just a fact of life. Has been for 10's of millennia. Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians, Chinese, and so on and so forth back to the beginning. They all built in floodplains. Let's stop jabbing a finger at people and give them a hand instead. If you don't want to lend a hand, that's fine too, just go about your day. No need to denigrate people.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > "People on the coasts live in floodplains too" Yes I understand that, but that's not how it's perceived. People do not have objective worldviews, and it is the worldviews of the general public that determine whether or not something is considered newsworthy. I'm not defending this status quo, I'm explaining it. Something else to consider: hurricanes are personified. They're given names, and therefore make convenient villains. This increases their newsworthiness. If particularly snowy winters or intense rainstorms were given names, that would increase the newsworthiness of inland floods. Another thing to consider: when an inland flood occurs due to a dam collapse, rather than because of unnamed weather systems, that becomes more newsworthy and memorable than most hurricanes. I'd say the Johnstown Flood is about as memorable, maybe moreso, than the Galveston Hurricane, despite killing fewer people. That's because the Johnstown Flood was due to a dam collapse. A dam with a name, a discrete object with human owners. That's why an inland flood in rural Pennsylvania is remembered nearly a century and a half later, while most inland floods hardly make the news at all. Consider also the Great Molasses Flood. By flood standards or even industrial disaster standards, the number of casualties were small. However everybody has heard of the Great Molasses Flood. Why? Because it happened in Boston? No, because it was molasses! That's very unusual, nobody would have anticipated that, and therefore it's newsworthy.
holtalanm 8y ago
from nebraska. can confirm. entire towns have been evacuated due to flooding. only way to get around some of them currently is via airboat.
protomyth 8y ago
Its not on the coast or in Chicago or Denver, so it really will only get regional coverage. The book about fark.com "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News" has a section illustrating this with a crane collapse in Manhattan and then one in St. Louis. A few years back with that winter storm hit South Dakota and killed a lot of cattle (the cattle were mostly in the summer fields and the weather actually went from freezing rain to blizzard), it wasn't really reported and people wondered what the heck was going on with steak prices. I sometimes wish there was a "trend news" website that reported supply to consumer news.
kevinconaway 8y ago
There was a front page story about it in the New York Times last week (in fact there is still a story on the home page below the fold about it [0]) but it got bumped for coverage of the attack in NZ [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/flood-facts.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/flood-facts.html?actio...
wffurr 8y ago
I didn't have to dig far in the Boston Globe to find an article about it. It's third in the Nation and World section.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

dd36 8y ago

Wow. Why have this much critical infrastructure near flood zones? Given that climate change is increasing the frequency of major floods, why hadn’t they hardened their protections?

philwelch 8y ago
Airfields tend to be easier to build on flat, level ground. Strategic reconnaissance and airborne command aircraft make sense to base in a geographically central location so they can easily cover the entire continent.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
namenumber 8y ago
From the omaha.com article on the subject it seems like there was a desire from Offett and an intent to put in greater flood-resistance infrastructure but it was stonewalled by questions about whether it was needed. So i guess the answer is in the realm of "some people knew and planned, but others tried to disregard both warnings and previous near-disaster floods." https://www.omaha.com/news/military/one-third-of-offutt-underwater-at-least-buildings-damaged-in/article_631f9b34-5271-50e8-b5eb-19f488daaf32.html https://www.omaha.com/news/military/one-third-of-offutt-unde...
- dd36 8y ago
  Sounds like what’s happening at a larger scale =(
oliveshell 8y ago
I’d imagine that the location was seen as useful during the Cold War years due to being far inland in a rural area away from likely targets of a nuclear attack. As for flood mitigation, I’m sure it’s the same as it is anywhere: risk assessments probably considered the likelihood of ‘really bad’ flooding, and the potential impacts, too low to be worth the cost. (As to whether that was wise or not, I’ve got no idea.) (Edit— from Wikipedia: ”Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington chose to locate the Air Force's crucial long-range atomic strike force at Offutt primarily because the base was centrally located on the North American continent, placing it well beyond the existing range of long-range, nuclear-armed bombers to (then) stay safely out of range of hostile missiles or bomber aircraft.”)

dev_dull 8y ago

I just heard about the flooding yesterday. Sometimes I don’t get the news. I’ll see wall-to-wall coverage on some inane thing, but only learn about huge, destructive flooding from random people I follow on Twitter. Maybe we’re just sleeping in the bed we made, but how do we get out of it?

jnurmine 8y ago
Well, some people think that we can't, the only thing left to do is to brace for impact. The one getting most media visibility recently is Jem Bendell's "deep adaptation". This is not a new invention though. It was preceded by various resilient communities/resilient cities approaches, post-societal crash prepper books and prepper forums in general, and so on.

cowkingdeluxe 8y ago

Related to this base, if you want to see the F22 fly up close, go the day before an airshow there to the east end of the runway and you will only be hundreds of feet away. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+NE/@41.1108278,-95.891636,754m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x879477c2e10f0c3d:0xd7d7cf14fa470392!8m2!3d41.1242718!4d-95.9145568 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+NE/@41.1108278...

aquova 8y ago

Just to give my experience: I'm from Nebraska, and was back there this past week. When I arrived home (in Lincoln), there was still 4-6 inches of snow on the ground, following the snowiest winter they've had in decades. It turned about 60 degrees on a rainy day and all that snow melted, but the ground was still frozen and had nowhere to go. We didn't have bad flooding in my area, but my parents yard was ankle deep in water for about 24 hours. The interstates were closed, and I got detoured twice driving out. It really is something.

zackmorris 8y ago

The Cooper nuclear power plant 59 miles from Omaha is also shutting down temporarily due to flooding: https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station-still-operating-but-preparing-for-shutdown-as/article_f0edca08-0454-5795-8622-3646e954ae5e.html https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station-still... The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant 18 miles from Omaha was shut down permanently on October 24, 2016 due to flooding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Calhoun_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Calhoun_Nuclear_Generatin...

deadmetheny 8y ago
The river isn't necessarily going to reach the 45' point that CNS requires for shutdown - it might, but no guarantee. FCNS shut down due to budgetary concerns - its operational costs were too high to justify keeping it open. The flood was just the last of a long series of issues they had down there.

newnewpdro 8y ago

George Carlin used to criticize people living in flood planes back in the day, catastrophic flooding is such a regular occurrence it made its way into his stand-up routine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw

ycombinatoracct 8y ago

Offutt AFB isn't too far from GCP us-central1. Anyone know if Google Cloud has said anything about the flood?

kevin_b_er 8y ago
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic-floods-inundate-nebraska https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic-flo... See the interactive slidable map. A google data center that is probably us-central1 is just above the lake above the 'e' in Detail. The waters appear to still be a ways off. Google says it is in Council Bluffs, Iowa and there's a large google data center there you can find on google maps. A link to the location on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22 https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22

protomyth 8y ago

I'm actually a bit worried about the Red River in North Dakota. 1997 really was not very fun (well, the 96-97 winter was horrid). This rapid melt with too much snow and frozen ground is hitting a lot of places. My parent's place in MN had water coming in the basement apartment. It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.

mitchty 8y ago
> It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are. I'm from ND originally and remember that flood, and yeah, it floods here in the cities a lot. This was more due to the super: zomg cold+snow, to... zomg its 40F and the entire streets a river cause nobody cleans out the drains in the fall prior to winter so that thaws are ok. I'll just say in St Paul, rapid thaws means almost everyones basements flood. Even on the hills, its insane how easily it happens.